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senior year

So, I’ve been away from my own blogosphere a while. Sometimes it just doesn’t feel like the right thing to do. The concept of “shelter in place,” made real during the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, really appealed to me over the past several months. The idea of staying in where it is safe so that the world can take time to set itself right before we venture out again. It doesn’t have to be about danger, but sometimes it is about preservation of self. This is what I have been doing – sheltering in place.

But today it seems right to venture back here. Today there is news that is worth sharing, because I can say that investing in hope pays dividends.

In a post last summer, I wondered when it was okay to give aways things that most children outgrow during high school. We all have remnants from our childhood stashed away somewhere (don’t we?), but in the case of our boy we have, well, a lot of things we know that he is not ready to part with. So I kept most of it. In that process, I took a very long look at the book shelf. The ABC and farm books are long since packed away, but many of the most beautifully illustrated books, picture encyclopedias and easy readers remain. I know he appreciates the images and that they inform both his understanding of a story and his artistic sensibilities. Still, I very deliberately left the collection of biographies on the shelf next to the head of the bed. I bought them during the middle school years, when they were age appropriate, because they were fact-based, had lot of photos but contained some narrative stretches on highly reinforcing figures in history: Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Amelia Earhart. He always looks up facts on the internet about these people; I convinced myself the books were still useful, and they look nice (and not too incongruous) on the shelf, too.

I know he will never be in love with books the way I was. I know he will never delight in conjuring places, events and people from a page dense with type. I know that I am lucky that his visual learning style is tailor-made for 21st century digital information. I know all of that, but all of my knowingness didn’t prepare me for the moment when, upon peeking in to say good night, I saw him reach over and slip a book off the biography shelf, open it and begin reading. Reading for pleasure. Reading for information. Reading pages on which there were no pictures at all. Just type. I slipped away unnoticed, afraid that I would interrupt and ruin the moment by making too big a deal of it.

But it was a big deal. It reminded me (not for the first time) that I kid myself that I know more about him than I do, and that creating limited opportunities for him will yield limited results. I won’t be placing Ulysses on the shelf anytime soon, but I’ll be upping the ante on a lot of fronts based on this moment. It also reminded me that one of the reasons that I felt the need to shelter in place was that the conversations that swirl around the senior year of high school are all about competition and achievement. Conversations that lead to well-meaning questions that I don’t necessarily want to answer. That simple act of opening a book means more to me than an 800 SAT score, but there aren’t many who would understand that, and I am past the point of wanting to explain it (and yet here I am, explaining it).

I need to leave more books on the shelf, more doors ajar, more options on the table. We don’t have to have anyone’s life mapped out by May.

But I had to know something. The next morning at breakfast, I asked him what he read before bed last night.